Who counts, who's counted – power and inequality

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About Alex

Alex Cobham is a development economist and chief executive at the international Tax Justice Network, and a visiting fellow at King’s College London IDI. Over the last fifteen years Alex has held various policy and research posts, including as a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, as chief policy adviser at Christian Aid and head of research at Save the Children (UK), and at Oxford as a junior economics fellow at St Anne’s college and as a researcher at Queen Elizabeth House.

Alex’s work has mainly focused on issues of taxation, horizontal and vertical inequality, and illicit financial flows. He is the author or co-author of a range of academic papers, policy reports, and book chapters, including some of the first estimates of the costs of illicit financial flows for developing countries; and played a central role in the development of the first major development INGO campaign on tax justice at Christian Aid. With Andy Sumner, he has proposed a new measure of inequality, the Palma ratio.

Recent publications include the first paper on the Financial Secrecy Index in a leading economics journal; the discussion paper for the 2014 High-Level Tana Forum on Security in Africa, focused on illicit financial flows; and a proposal for illicit flow targets (including cost-benefit analysis) for the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus. Recent refereeing duties include Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Development Policy Review, Accounting Forum, and Oxford University Press.